Tom, If you as an IT manager are concerned about employees using Google Apps to store corporate information, then your IT company should block the use of the site.

But
- no corporate domainname
- no domainforwarding
- No possibility to collaborate with people from other domains (within the same company)

So who would use it? Companies whose members can´t remember their E-Mail domainsuffix? Companies without a corporate Website?
I think, Google is great keeping tools as simple as possible but still being useful. This time it doesn´t work. Maybe it´s just marketing.

Corporate Search is exponentially harder than internet search. Corporate (Enterprise) search involves unstructured documents like excel spreadsheets, word documents, data in databases, email etc, and are not linked together neatly like on the web. (making pagerank useless)
So not only is it a much harder challenge to index this data, but to give it relevance and meaning takes very advanced technology.
Companies like Autonomy are leading the way in enterprise search, and Google is only a new entry to the field and is way behind the curve, and only relying on marketing and branding, not technology.

Look how many times we reinvent the wheel in our jobs.

Having better searches, relevant search results, to our fingers faster is a huge win for whoever can do it right. I’m putting a SharePoint solution in place at my current company, and the biggest thing is search: all this great information the business creates, and in IT all these little IT projects and solutions to business problems are out there, but no one knows where.

Bravoooo Google.

You finally gave us the applications that we are using since Windows 95.

I cant wait to see what is next.

There is no google magic now. I really really hope yhoo and MSFT merger goes thru, and that will tell where exactly google stands.

Currently the are given too much importance by media,analysts and investors. Google is able to hide all of its incompetence just because there is huge gap between them and the 2nd. There are so many failure products from Google. Their stock is worth at these levels only if it still shows “wow” magic which was lost longtime ago.

Vow.. corporate privacy is so out of fashion now.

Rajan Tawate

@William – The issue isn’t the user pissing off their IT department its Google causing the user to piss of their IT department. Put it this way, Google can make money in two ways. By getting corporate users to use Google Apps as is and make money off revenue or by selling these apps to corporations. But if Google pisses IT departments off they’ll find that (a) IT departments can block Google apps (bye bye revenue source one) and (b) that IT departments won’t be interested in Google anymore (bye bye revenue source two)

@Will – That very well may be true…now. But Startups go one of two ways: They either fail, or the get bigger and are forced to develop big, lethargic IT departments of their own.

“Small, entrepreneurial businesses remain the diversified backbone of American business. These businesses don’t have big lame corporate IT departments that rule over them. Worldwide, this is even more true.”

My startup uses Google Apps and it works very well for us. I don’t miss the lethargic, outsourced IT department that I had to pull teeth with at my last “corporate” job.

Tom you’re simply out of touch or worried about your job in the aging dinosaur that is MSFT centric IT

IT at universities is a somewhat different beast. Service to admin and teaching sides are usually mutually exclusive in the sense that “corporate” admin needs are often far different from teaching with technology needs. This plays out (or will, more and more) as decisions about what productivity apps should students be fluent in – Microsoft of google – will soon be commonplace in academia.

“Quiz Question: Anybody old enough to recall pissing off IT by purchasing a microcomputer and crunching your own FORTRAN code without IT writing it?”

History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes…

Quiz Answer: Use unauthorized software and encourage your fellow co-workers to do the same”

Sorry to post off topic, but I burst into laughter at this. Tom, do you realize that the main reason why IE is still the main browser used on the Internet is because Firefox is “unauthorized software.” From my experience with IT Departments: if they say not to do it, then it must be a good idea.

Sorry if that offends.

I know work in a corporation of 2, with worldwide co-workers. Whereas NING and similar provide something that is useful – having real groupware that really lerts us do real tasks together is invaluable. We do not want to pay corporate prices for this.

My current challenge is creating a demonstration of lowest cost, lowest tech, technology support for distance education in Africa. I will figure a way to subvert the single domain issue. I look forward to Googe revolutionising mobile phones soon too.

I do not mind Google’s aspiration to make money from advertising or corporations – they are good guys if they let “the rest of us” play with the tools for free.